“Pg. 24” A Pseudo-Litany, Being Lines Written by Anon.
Rummaging through clutter, boxes & boxes strewn like flotsam or shipwreckage in one indissoluble heap, up in my fiancee’s attic one snow-bound afternoon in Pigeon Cove, MA, I happened upon two shoeboxes of floppy disks & opened them, hoping to determine their owner, their origin, anything pertinent—the house, inherited from her great grandparents, at times seemed foreign territory she once shared, Platonically, with a strange man who paid his share of rent on time, and never made waves, never showed any interest, other than obligatory & cursory etiquette, in my fiancee’s affairs. (Were the floppies his? the Litany? The books & books of poems I discovered, abandoned like old clothes?) Once I heard him pacing and mumbling, reciting something intense & powerful (rhythmic) to himself again & again, the words lost to the muffling of the wall between us. Had he thought we were conspiring against him? Clicking around the floppies, I discovered the following: page 24, scattered throughout several files, arranged in various configurations, and imagined it was his voice, so quiet and murmuring in my head as I perused each fragment, each line. An educated man, I have long felt responsible for their discovery, and here—previous iterations notwithstanding—have selected what I believe are each “composition’s” definitive locution by (what I had found, merely fragments; the poet, unknown) our still unspoken “Anon.”:
Stropt “elocutions / executions” (estranged words)
Mapped (neighborly?) in langue-repose. On pg. 24.
Whilst ammo.
Alliterates / obliterates civilizations
Spelled “oddlye” on pg. 24.Pg. 24 attacks.
“Blank white page.”
Aggressively w/ ack-ack aggressively.
Not of necessity but by virtue of its circumstance.
&by this it is meant on pg. 24:
Old Spice GermX Qtips Crest Tegrin Lancômbe are prose poems.
Bar codes.
Signs beside poetry’s oval sink on pg. 24.
This is pg. 24.
This is pg. 24 the following day:
Pigeon Cove to Manassas to Point Reyes: Lisa driving lines across lines on pg. 24. Blue gift bags never vary by a single word. The hours ask dolor for color on pg. 24. There is hope equated with pg. 24. (There in the glare of the particulars stands Lisa holding a volume of Frost open to pg. 24. King off on woods in Trojan is tycoon.) The shoals being eastern is the crux of the matter on pg. 24. Pg. 24 & pg. 24 are identical to a point. But not in time.